


In Every Universe

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Depression, Different Bands, Dimensional Portal, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hiatus, M/M, Mirror Universe, No band, Soulmates, Tales from 2011, True Love, best buy incident, so many alternate universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-11-12 20:29:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11169480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: He's lost the band. He's lost Patrick. Pete Wentz has nothing left. So when a dimensional portal opens up in his shitty motel room, Pete goes through. Now he's hopping through alternate timelines, trying to find one where he and Patrick live happily ever after so he can go home and fix his life. Hiatus fic.For Bandom Bingo 2017 square: torture.Accompanying playlist here.Preview image byurieclectic.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Helllllloooooo ladies and gentlemen! This fic is full of fun and feelings and, well. Pete's emotional torture of himself. For the prompt, you see. Not because I'm a bad person.
> 
> I'm hoping to update weekly. I'm happy you're here!
> 
> [Accompanying playlist here.](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/4NRBzP0sudCEhZOUe28mcI) Definitely listen to Soco Amaretto Lime by Brand New with the prologue if you want your heart to HURT.  
> Amazing, brand-new fanartist [urieclectic](http://urieclectic.tumblr.com/) designed the gorgeous header art for this story.

Pete wants good things for himself. He does, he does. He just doesn’t deserve them.

He may have had a bit to drink. He may be feeling maudlin. But, fuck: things are really broken this time. This is the sharpest cliff he’s ever come to, and he can’t see any way back from the edge.

Everything behind him is burning, beat-up, broken. The only thing ahead is _this_ : Pete Wentz suffering and alone, having ruined everything he’s ever touched, tormented by the fucking memory of how good it was when it had it. It’s only a matter of how long the road is. It could be a very long trek through the shitty, hostile wilderness.

Or it could be a very short one.

Pete’s been through some shit in his life. He has. Just in the last five years, there’s been the suicide attempt, the dick pic, the pregnancy-marriage-divorce, and who could _fucking_ forget, his band splitting up. The band was only truly good thing he ever built in his life and he torched it. Loathly, unstable, self-obsessed Pete. They couldn’t fucking bear to be around him anymore. He can’t either.

It’s like the whole world figured out at once what a piece of shit he’s always known himself to be. He stares at himself in the full-length mirror, hating every distorted inch of his image. He used to brace up, telling himself he could get through anything, now that he’d found Patrick. That his life had a direction and a purpose and a meaning, and the proof of it was that Patrick existed, the other half of his heart housed in another body—like living fucking friendship charms, the two of them. He believed it.

Well. He doesn’t fucking have Patrick anymore.

It’s been three months since they even spoke on the phone, let alone sat in the same room. It’s starting to seem possible that they could go the whole rest of their lives never seeing each other again. Patrick lives a long way from Beverly Hills; it’s not like they’re going to bump into each other at fucking Starbucks.

The mirror hangs on the back of the flimsy bathroom door of the hotel room Pete is renting by the week. He’s left most of his belongings in Ashlee’s house, for her to sell or store or set on fire. He’s living in two-star, furnished squalor. He’s renting under a fake name. If he dropped his wallet in a mailbox and died in this hotel room, he could really disappear.

Oh, he’s fucking thought about it.

For the first time in Pete’s life, there really is nothing left to lose. He’s lost it all. His son will grow up without him. His band is over. Patrick—his bestfriendsoulmateeverything Patrick—is not fucking speaking to him. As in not even taking his calls.

Pete is. Pete is, but barely. Pete is not doing okay.

It’s all irreparable. The universe is anoxic. There’s nothing here for him to breathe. Since it’s all jagged endings anyway, he doesn’t stop himself. He watches his reflection splinter and scatter and splatter with red as he punches mechanically, again and again, the insufferable face of his own reflection. The mirror shatters into so many crushed refractions, each new knife-edge its own invitation. What would happen, if he accepted them all?

But as his glass reflection falls away, something happens Pete does not expect. Instead of pressboard and glue, behind the mirror there is—fuck. It can only be described as a vortex. It’s not so much black as it is _everycolor_ , and it’s—it’s definitely swirling. Pete starts kicking, slamming at what’s left of the mirror with his combat boot, clearing a passageway. A path.

Pete doesn’t ask himself what the vortex leads to. He doesn’t worry about what he’s leaving behind. He scoops dislodged glass out of frame, heedless of the cuts on his hands, and doesn’t think twice.

He goes through.


	2. Timeline #640b: Patrick Wasn’t At Borders That Day

Pete lands face-first on a gritty tile floor. A bathroom—a public bathroom. He’s eye to eye with a wet clump of toilet paper.

Honestly, he thinks about just staying there. The fact that he apparently just traveled through a mirror-vortex is less exciting than you’d think. It’s been a long time since Pete’s felt excited about anything. It’s been a long time since Pete’s felt anything at all.

Then the door swings open, smashes into his boot. He gets up so the door can open. The person coming in gives him a strange look. Pete’s knuckles are split, his arm bloody to the elbow, his shirt wet from best-left-unidentified floor fluid. Pete doesn’t give a fuck. He flips off the stranger on his way out the door.

He emerges next to a row of drinks coolers, a shelf of snacks. A gas station: he’s in a gas station. He still feels like shit—now he just feels like shit in a different location. So much for the Siege fucking Perilous.

He could take a cab home, but he doesn’t want to be there any more than he wants to be in this gas station. There’s no rush. He walks.

He ducks into a record store when it starts to rain. For no better reason than to prove he can still feel pain, he heads to the Fs, looks for their records. For the only remaining evidence that he’s ever been part of anything good. Only—he can’t find any. Not to be arrogant, but Fall Out Boy is—was—big enough that there should be _some_ evidence they ever existed. It’s a punch to his sour stomach: The Faint, Flogging Molly, Foo Fighters, Foreigner. Fuck.

He goes to the Ss next. He has quite a collection of Truant Wave Eps at home. Every time he sees one, he buys it. He’s like a Patrick Stump magpie. At this point, he’s taking what he can get. They’ve barely spoken in a year. He misses that voice.

But in the S section, he finds something he cannot explain. Truant Wave, yes, though it looks like some kind of special edition because he doesn’t recognize the cover—and an EP called 18 Going on Extinct, and two albums Pete’s never seen or heard of: Pop Culture Reference and Bad Side of 25. When the fuck did Patrick release 3 albums and how did he do it without triggering Pete’s Google alert? He flips over the jewel cases, looks at the dates: 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010. It’s impossible. It’s some kind of joke. Someone knows he comes here, buys Patrick’s album over and over again. Someone’s pranking him. Someone’s pranking him, or—or—

Pete takes the whole lot up to the register. Luckily, he’s already used up his lifetime supply of shame, so he has no problem handing over a credit card that says PETE WENTZ and asking, “Do you have anything by Fall Out Boy?”

The cashier blinks at him. “Sorry, man. Never heard of them.”

“It’s only been a year!” Pete snaps. He takes a breath. “Can you check the computer, see if you can order anything?”

There’s nothing in the order system. There’s nothing on Google either. According to the whole of the fucking internet, Fall Out Boy just… never existed.

Just when Pete’s really starting to freak out, the cashier squints at his credit card. “Pete Wentz, huh? Didn’t you used to play in that hardcore band—what was it—Arma Angelus?”

Pete barely makes it out of that store before he freaks the fuck out. He has to find Patrick. He has to figure out what the fuck is going on.

He convinces his cab driver to play one of the impossible albums as they speed towards the address Pete can only fucking hope Patrick still lives at in this bizarro world. He picks the first one, 18 Going on Extinct. It’s strange to hear such a shy, folksy, acoustic version of young Patrick. Nineteen years old and singing with the promise of the voice he’ll grow into, hinted at when he lets himself take risks. The songs are cautious, technically deft but ringing of inhibition. A smile tugs at Pete’s lips. It’s like you can hear the hat Patrick is hiding behind, right there in the music—a beanie with a sonic presence.

Pete throws cash at the cabbie, not much bothered about which numbers appear on the bills, and just about fucking springs to the front door of what he hopes, hopes, hopes is Patrick’s house. He hammers on the door way too aggressively. He’s getting soaked in the downpour but he doesn’t care. His heart is attempting to tear itself out of his chest. It is getting harder and harder to breathe.

_This is just something your body is doing_ , he coaches himself, like his therapist taught him before he stopped going to therapy in favor of pursuing a precipitous decline, a supernova flame-out designed to consume anything good in his life he hasn’t yet damaged. _Panic is like a really unpleasant hiccup. It can’t hurt you. This is just a moment that happens to suck_.

The door opens at last and Pete would be relieved, except he doesn’t recognize the person on the other side.

Until all of a sudden he does. Bright red dyed hair, ginger-gold beard and sideburns, tortoiseshell glasses, a trim body in a red and black flannel and torn-kneed jeans. It’s Patrick, kind of. He could not be more different from the chubby, blond, clean-shaven, snazzily dressed hat wearer Pete last laid eyes on a year ago, but he’s Patrick all the same.

Pete is so happy to see him he’s inarticulate, struck mute by gratitude. It doesn’t even matter that they’re fighting, that they haven’t really talked since the hiatus started, that some kid at some snobby record shop said Fall Out Boy never existed. He is a Pete and this is a Patrick. The two of them make so much sense, have such strong internal logic, that it doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is completely batshit crazy.

Pete throws his arms around Patrick, wraps around him in a crushing hug. He’s not wasting any more opportunities because he’s distracted by his own self-loathing self-pity. It all just spills out: “I love you, I’m in love with you,” he babbles. “I’m sorry for everything. I should have said it sooner, I fucked it all up. I was an idiot to leave the band instead of dealing with my issues. Don’t get married. Run away with me instead.”

Patrick pulls back violently. “ _Pete_?” he says. “Pete _Wentz_?”

Pete thought that much was kind of obvious. He nods.

“Whoa. I haven’t seen you since—what, Warped Tour ‘07? How fucked up are you right now? Because I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“2007?” Pete repeats. “Patrick. Patrick, it’s _me_. We’re in a band together? Well—we used to be? We’re best friends and probably soulmates, only I fucked up and let you think I didn’t love you because I thought I was protecting you, and now we’re on hiatus and not talking and I’m like, two days and a well-placed fifth of whiskey from falling apart?” He’s babbling again, he can hear it. But he has to make Patrick understand. The world’s coming apart at the seams. He’s in imminent danger of—fucking free fall.

“None of that ever happened,” Patrick says. He’s backing up, shaking his head. “We’ve never been in a band, we’re not even _friends_. Is there someone I can call to come get you, dude? You don’t seem okay, and you’re freaking me out.”

Before Pete can get anything sensible out of his mouth, Travie McCoy of all people enters the familiar foyer. He comes up to Patrick, lays a hand on his shoulder. Patrick backs up another step so their bodies are flush.

“You okay, babe?” Travie asks. “I heard emotions.”

There is a gold wedding band shining on Travie’s hand. Patrick places his left hand over Travie’s. In the rainstorm gloom, Patrick’s matching ring gleams like a fucking meteor hurtling towards Pete’s heart, like the last thing the dinosaurs saw before they went the fuck extinct.

With a feeling like a bucket of ice-cold centipedes crawling down his shirt, Pete realizes that for this, there is only one explanation. He’s in an alternate universe. He has to be. He’s in another fucking _dimension_. This is the mirror ‘verse episode of Star Trek. Oh god. Does the beard mean this is Evil Patrick? But no—he’s pretty sure he’s gotta be the worst, darkest timeline Pete, and he’s shaved clean.

The synaptic surge of realization carries with it a plan so fully formed it’s like a mission from god. Pete is going to search every fucking dimension until he finds one where he and Patrick live happily ever after, where the band never breaks up and Patrick loves him too. He’s going to travel the entire fucking multiverse until he understands what went wrong in his tiny corner of it, and then he’s going to go home and fix his life.

For the first time in a year, Pete feels like he has a fucking _purpose_ again. It feels so good, his eyes well up with tears. Fuck. Fuck. He’ll scour all of time and space for a shred of fucking hope, and he’ll make his life make sense again. And if there’s no hope—if every version of Pete ruins every version of Patrick, if in an infinite array of alternate timelines he infinitely fucks in up—well. Then Pete Wentz will die somewhere very far from home, and he won’t have to worry that someone he loves will find him.

“Can I use your bathroom?” Pete asks Mr. and Mr. Stump-McCoy. He can see the deep apprehension on Patrick’s face—he must seem like a madman—but Travie says, “Of course. Long time no see, man.”

Pete has no time for fucking pleasantries. He pushes past them, makes a beeline for the downstairs bathroom. In any dimension, he knows the layout of this house by heart.

He locks the door behind him, wraps his fucked-up fist in a hand towel, and punches the mirror apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so excited to hear what you guys think of this one. <3


	3. Timeline #11,981: Andy Didn’t Make It In Time For Evening Out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Sunday! I hope you like it! Tell me e v e r y t h i n g

This time, Pete comes out in a bathroom he recognizes. Black and white tile floor, maroon walls, broken paper towel dispenser: this is the bathroom at the recording studio they used for Grave.

Pete knows it well. They used to make out in here. Patrick was juuuuust old enough for that to be—well—an acceptable level of Pete Wentz creepery. _You_ try spending that much time crammed in a recording booth with Patrick, watching that _mouth_ on a microphone. See how long your moral superiority lasts then.

This time, Pete lets himself out of the bathroom before he’s struck by any doors. He startles himself just as much as the person on their way in: Patrick. An instantly recognizable Patrick, thank god: long bangs and sideburns and a soft middle and a newsboy cap, a hoodie under a sport coat. _His_ Patrick, he thinks. Maybe there is only one other universe. Maybe he’s already home.

But why would his Patrick be here? They haven’t recorded at this studio since 2003.

“You changed your clothes,” Patrick says. “And your hair? Didn’t you have a mohawk when you stormed out, like, 20 minutes ago?”

Okay. Not his universe after all. Pete thinks fast, comes up with nothing. “Haircut,” he lies baldly. “Uh, what are we recording today? I mean—are we recording?”

“We _were_ ,” Patrick says, “until you stormed out.” Patrick is studying him with deep mistrust. Pete has no way to explain his apparently altered appearance that will make Patrick feel any better about this situation.

“Sing me a bit?” Pete asks. He wants to know what their alternate dimension selves are working on, what FOB would sound like if they hadn’t broken up.

“Sing? Oh no. That’s Omar’s gig. I don’t sing.”

Okay, _this_ is the darkest fucking timeline.

“I don’t even have the words to express how preposterous that is,” says Pete. “You _do_ sing, better than anyone else I’ve ever heard.”

Patrick flushes bright pink. At least he still blushes the same. “Shower doesn’t count,” he mutters. “You know I don’t do—spotlights.”

Something very selfish and very crazy and very brilliant occurs to Pete then. Here’s a universe where Patrick’s speaking to him, right? A universe with no hiatus. They’re recording in a cheap-ass, pay-by-the-hour establishment, like a recording artist whorehouse, only slightly more legitimate than the booths at the mall, so the band hasn’t done that _well_ or anything—but he bets he can fix that, once he gets Patrick singing. Anyway, who cares how well they’re doing? They’re a _band_ , they’re together.

Maybe this is Pete’s second chance. Maybe he can just—stay here. Make _this_ universe his home.

“Let me take you to dinner,” Pete says abruptly.

Patrick does a frowny squint. “What? No, I’m pissed at you right now. you’re being a real dick about the Psycho hook.”

“I’m totally right, whatever it is,” Pete assures him. He’d cite examples of times his insistence has saved songs, the way Patrick has hated basically every hit they’ve ever had, but he doesn’t know the hits in this universe. Maybe this version of Patrick is less contrary about Pete’s strokes of radio genius.

Or maybe, without Patrick singing, they haven’t had any hits.

Pete reaches out, touches Patrick’s cheek, and really _looks_ into his eyes. “Patrick? Let me take you to dinner.” He imbues the words with as much significance as he can.

Patrick backs up a step, doing a nervous laugh. “Uh, you sound like you’re asking me—?”

“On a date,” Pete finishes, nodding. “Yeah.”

Patrick’s face drains of all color and then, just as swiftly, flushes pink from forehead to chin, from the tips of the ears on in. Pete loves him so much he starts laughing. When was the last time he felt like this? He’s lost so much, he doesn’t need to be cautious anymore. There’s not a chance he wouldn’t take.

“Okay,” Patrick squeaks. He looks like he wants to disappear. Pete makes a loose fist, hits the brim of Patrick’s baseball cap, and knocks it off his face.

“It’s good to see your eyes,” Pete says, his voice husky with meaning it. Patrick’s blushing so hard he actually covers his face with his hands.

And just like that, Pete’s happy.

*

They go out for pizza, because it’s the first thing they ever ate together and Pete’s feeling seven shades of nostalgic. They don’t get Home Run Inn, the shitty South Side pizza of that first shared meal; they go to a moderately classy Neopolitan place called Spacca Napoli. Pete orders burrata and a bottle off the fancy wine list. Patrick looks so impressed Pete’s glad he has cash: by the look of it, the Pete Wentz of this universe doesn’t have a bank account that can cope with wine lists.

Pete really should learn everything he can about this reality, if he’s going to usurp himself and live in it. Fuck knows he’s had enough experience as a Pete Wentz impersonator. But he can’t tear himself away from the giddy pleasure of this: being out on a real date with an unwed Patrick Stump, one who is speaking to him, smiling shyly at him, getting flustered and dropping his silverware when Pete grins back. He feels—he feels like maybe he can deal with his own timeline being broken, with vanishing from his own history and never looking back. With Patrick smiling at him, he can swallow any bitterness, discard any ugliness. He can even pretend the blight, his eponymous blight, won’t follow him here.

“I’ve wanted to do this forever,” he tells Patrick.

“Eat burrata?” Patrick smiles at the tablecloth, as if to conceal his shameless ploy to get Pete to say nice things about him out loud.

Pete’s got no trouble on that front, though. Loving Patrick Stump out loud is more or less the only thing he’s ever really wanted.

“Ever since I saw you in those fucking knee socks, I’ve wanted to—eat burrata.”

But Patrick cocks his head, looks confused. “Knee socks?”

“The day we met,” Pete prompts. “At your parents’. The first time I heard you sing.”

Patrick’s shaking his head. “We met in Joe’s garage,” he corrects. “I was for sure wearing a terrible tech vest. But I don’t remember knee socks, and I definitely didn’t sing. I’ve never sung for anyone.”

Pete frowns at the prosciutto and bread before him. This is a pretty lousy universe, he decides. How many things are going to be off like this? It sets his skin on edge, like holding a serrated knife against his pulse: a nearly imperceptible sickly scrape.

“You’ll sing for me,” Pete says confidently, pointing at Patrick with a chunk of bread. “You go, then. How long have you been willing to say yes to… burrata, if I asked you?”

Patrick bites his lip. He is so fucking much. He is everything. “This is embarrassing,” he warns. Pete rubs his hands together greedily. “But the first show I ever saw you in? I had this fantasy about running into you, like, in the bathroom line after. You’d say hey, I’d compliment your set, you’d realize I was this amazingly cool guy, we’d talk all night… and we’d totally make out in the parking lot.”

“Bathroom lines and parking lots? Wow, how am I ever going to compete with _that_ over-the-top romantic fantasyscape?” Pete teases. He’s thinking about how he never heard any of this from _his_ Patrick, how he never got the chance to find out if his obsessive ardor was returned. He’s been a creep about Patrick since the day they met, felt it like a magnet in his gut, sure as fucking science, as the north star, as ionic bonds and celestial orbits. He’s always wondered—a feeling so terrifying, so huge; did Patrick feel the equal, opposite attraction?

Now he’ll never know.

Even with a Patrick Stump right here in front of him, flushed and lovely and perfect for him, Pete is choked by sudden sadness. This isn’t _his_ Patrick. This Patrick, the one who might maybe love him too, will never be the one he fell in love with.

“Pete? Are you okay?” Patrick asks. Pete’s eyes burn with sudden tears.

“I just need a minute,” Pete croaks. He pushes back from the table and only just makes it to the bathroom before the tears come. Pete bites his fist and tries not to fucking _howl_ , and this is the heroic visage he presents when the bathroom door bursts open and oh, shit storms in.

It’s the other Pete, he has time to think. Then a ball of muscular energy and purple-mohawked anger is physically slamming him in back into the wall. Painfully, he collides with the hand dryer hard enough that the plastic and his skin both give a little. This Pete works out, he thinks. He looks through lingering tears at bulky toned forearms bearing unrecognizable tattoos.

“What the fuck are you?” demands other-Pete. His voice is large, loud, half-gravelled like Pete’s screaming. This Pete is angrier than he is, he can feel it. This Pete hasn’t lost enough to feel helpless yet. This Pete has never been the punching bag of America, Pete realizes. This Pete has learned none of the shitty lessons of fame. He’s still all corners, all teeth. All the outrages of his protracted adolescence—they must seem fresh, without the violent wrench of Peter Pan out of Never-neverland and into televised notoriety.

“What the fuck do you want with Patrick?” Other-Pete shakes him by the collar, growling like a pit bull and mean like a PTA mom.

“The same thing you want with him,” Pete says. His voice, thick and a little snotty, has a toughness factor of zero. This angry roughneck version of him is probably unimpressed.

But no: Pete does register as a threat, apparently. Because other-Pete’s fist collides with his face without further deliberation. Hot, sharp pain; the crack of his skull connecting with the tiled wall; a moment of gold-white blindness; a wet, tingly gush down the left half of his face; a vertiginous slam of memories of a dozen other punches landing like a second hit. He blinks his eyes open to the sting of blood, pouring like a motherfucker out of a throbbing cut on his eyebrow. God, it’s been a long time since Pete was in a fight. It’s never quite so literally been a slugfest with himself before. Hulk  Hogan here looks like he’s never stopped fighting.

Other-Pete’s fist is cocked and ready about an inch from Pete’s other eye, the one that isn’t blood-blind and swiftly swelling shut. Other-Pete holds him by the collar like he’s one wrong look away from full strangulation. The neck of Pete’s shirt is hot and wet with blood.

“You wanna try answering again?” Other-Pete growls.

Pete can’t help it. Pain is intoxicating and clarifying at once. He starts to laugh.

Other-Pete is so confused by that, after a moment of hysteria, he lets go. Pete drops to his knees and bleeds on the floor, plat plat plat, and can’t stop laughing.

“I should start lifting,” he gasps in between wild bursts of laughter. “I look—you look fucking hot!”

Other-Pete clearly has no idea how to proceed in this situation. Fucking join the club, Pete wants to say. “Listen,” he manages. “I’m you, okay? From another universe. I know how it sounds. But look at me—is there any other explanation?”

“ _Escape from Witch Mountain_ ,” the Petes say in unison. Other-Pete’s eyes widen, terrible twinned taste in movies making him believe it. Pete notices Other-Pete has a lip ring. It looks nice.

“I fucked things up in my timeline,” Pete tells himself. “I lost the band. I lost Patrick.”

“So you—what? Came here to steal mine?”

That’s a little too close to the truth to admit to Punchy McJaw here. Instead, Pete says, “I’m just—trying to figure out how it works, if it works. Me and Patrick together. I’m just looking for a universe where we end up together.”

Other-Pete’s face softens for the first time. He disappears into a bathroom stall, comes back with a wad of toilet paper that he offers for the gusher on Pete’s eyebrow. He squats down next to Pete, more or less companionable. This isn’t even the worst night Pete’s had this week. Far from it.

“We end up together in most universes,” Other-Pete says. “Don’t we? I mean, it feels like—”

“—magnets,” they say in unison.

“We must,” Other-Pete insists. “He’s the other part of my soul. I don’t think I’d even exist if he didn’t. Like—I’m the Velveteen Rabbit. He makes me real.”

Pete’s throat is tight, his chest burning. How long has he been underwater? How long has it been since he breathed? “But you haven’t _told_ him that,” Pete says, shaking his aching head. His voice is thick with unshed tears. His vision’s blurring out again. Patrick Stump is the golden ticket, and Pete Wentz is an idiot, every goddamn time.

“He’s sitting out there with a whole bunch of cheese and _feelings for you_ , man. He barely even hesitated when I asked him out. That’s _your_ Patrick, not mine, and he fucking loves you. So why are you in here, giving me a black eye, and not out there telling him you feel the same and living happily ever after?”

“Shit,” says Other-Pete. “I had no idea he—”

“Oh, yes you did,” Pete interrupts, not bothering to conceal his crabbiness. This asshole gets to punch him, push him through a mirror, and get the guy. It’s clear who gets the better deal here. “Stop being afraid of it. Go out there and get fucked up, if that’s what it takes. But don’t throw away all your chances like I did.”

“Sorry about the…” Other-Pete gestures to Pete’s whole general face area.

“We both know I think black eyes look cool.” Pete decides not to mention how much it _hurts_. “Now go fucking kiss the kid before I do.”

“You’re sure?” Other-Pete looks so nervous, Pete almost likes him. It is beyond surreal, seeing it from the outside. The self-doubt, the fear about Patrick—the fear of ruining him, of being ruined.

“Get out of here,” Pete urges. With a final backwards glance and a soaring, nervous smile, Other-Pete leaves the bathroom and goes to find the love of his life.

It is harder than it ought to be, picking himself up off yet another bathroom floor. Pete surveys himself in the mirror. It’s grimmer than ever—poorly shaven, barely rested, sobering up ugly, and now with bloody clothes and a fast-swelling face. He looks like a fucking ghoul.

This should be encouraging, this universe, but somehow it’s not. Even here, with Patrick ready and waiting (and silent—Pete can’t believe he’s leaving without convincing that kid to sing), he needed a fistfight in a public bathroom with the Ghost of Hiatus Fucking Past to get his shit together and go find a happily ever after. And who’s to say it’s even going to work out? If this is the level of divine intervention needed before they even eat pizza in a romantic way, it doesn’t really bode well for any Pete and Patrick in any other universe, does it?

Least of all his own.

But he can’t stay here, can’t supplant some other Pete just for the half-hollow pleasure of some other Patrick. He’s done enough living a simulacrum of his own life. No: there’s nothing he can do but punch out his own reflection, slip into the mirror, and move on.


	4. Timeline #45: No One Answered Pete’s Calls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry about this one. I cried in public while I wrote it.

This time, Pete steps out of the portal and into an unfamiliar closet. Or at least, it doesn’t _look_ familiar. There’s something about it, though…

Pete fingers the sleeves of sweaters and t-shirts, mostly grey and overwashed. Stretched necks flop off hangers. Everything is soft with wear, but no particular fondness. He tries to place it, the uncanny sense of been-here-before. He doesn’t recognize any of the shirts or sneakers. He doesn’t find it any more or less familiar than any other closet.

Then it hits him—the _smell_. Light, citrusy laundry soap, old record sleeves and a bit of sweat, a slightly stale remnant of CK Eternity that lingers like a shade. The smell, he knows.

The smell is Patrick.

Whatever universe, whatever reality—he knows the smell of Patrick by heart.

It’s certainly convenient, to have slipped through a dimensional wormhole and right into the closet of Patrick Stump. But god, this one’s gonna be awkward. He hopes Patrick’s not home, hopes Patrick’s significant other is nonexistent and/or not at home, hopes this is a world where they know each other and he’s not about to get brained with the novelty Cubs bat Patrick Prime keeps under his bed.

Pete hugs a worn flannel to his chest, breathes deep, takes in that nourishing smell for fortitude, and comes out of the closet.

Now he’s in a small, drab bedroom. It’s barely larger than the closet. Its one window is blocked with a heavy blanket. It is dark. There is a mattress on the floor, filling most of the room. Its rumpled heap of bedding is so unlike Patrick’s normal fastidiousness that it gives Pete pause. He hugs the flannel again, gives it another sniff. Actually it looks just like a flannel Pete owns in his universe. It wouldn’t be the first time he and Patrick had the same taste in clothes. He savors the thought that their heads are that close, even across dimensions. His successes in the last timeline have given him a feeling not entirely unlike hope.

There is a cluttered, messy bookcase, a milk crate beside the bed that is a forest of empty glasses. It is neighbored by a stack of dirty, rime-crusted plates. This room has a fusty smell, like maybe Pete is the first person to disturb it in some time. Maybe in this universe they’re touring, he think. Maybe this Patrick is out of town.

Pete recognizes some of Patrick’s things, CDs and favorite books, a Ninja Turtle action figure, a Roots poster, his battered first electric guitar leaned up in the corner with a hat hanging off the pegboard. But he’s never been in a Patrick’s bedroom that looks like this—dark, messy, grim. An interior design titled ‘depression.’

He ventures into the rest of the apartment. Hallway—dark and narrow. Living room—a twin of the bedroom, save with TV and couch instead of sad floor mattress. Pete has the heebie-jeebies. This place feels really _wrong_. But he can’t place it.

Then he steps onto the shitty curling linoleum floor of the small, fluorescent-lit kitchen and freezes. Pockmarked laminate cabinets, a half-stove, an ancient-looking refrigerator with not one thing on it—and at the small round kitchen table, head in his hands while he stares down into a glass of bourbon, Patrick Stump.

Patrick looks up at him with bleary bloodshot eyes and does a hitching little gasp. “Fuck,” he whispers. “Pete. It’s you.”

And before Pete can say a word, Patrick’s eyes spill over with tears.

This is a Patrick Pete has never seen before.

He is thin, for one thing—not thin like high school or the 2009 VMAs, thin like gaunt. His hair is duller than in Pete’s universe, a lifeless mouse fur color. It hangs in his eyes, overgrown and unwashed. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes puffy and red. It doesn’t look like this is his first cry of the day, or his first bourbon. He’s wearing grey, bleach-spotted jeans and a too-big t-shirt with a stretched-out neck.

He looks fucking miserable.

Pete doesn’t know what to do. He wants to take this sick, skinny ghost of his best friend in his arms, to absorb all the sorrow from his body, to use his hands and mouth and skin to shine Patrick bright and clean again. He wants to draw out the poison.

But he doesn’t know the rules here, and the situation seems—fragile. Carefully, he draws the chair out across from Patrick and seats himself at the table. Carefully, he reaches out for Patrick’s hand, in case he is allowed to take it. With sloppy desperation, Patrick grabs onto him like a drowning man and cries harder. There’s an increasingly large lump in Pete’s own throat, watching Patrick _hurt_ like this, out in the open. He’s never seen Patrick like this. He thought he was the only one who could do this misery-out-loud trick—thought he was the only one who needed to.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” Patrick says. His breath smells boozy. His words are slightly slurred, would probably go undetected if Pete didn’t know him by heart. “I’ve missed you so much.”

This must be a hiatus universe, then. Pete’s guts wrench. Maybe their band was never meant. Maybe they were never supposed to make it half this far.

He thinks about his universe, about Truant Wave Patrick, happy bleach-blond engaged to someone else Patrick. There is some key difference here, something he’s not getting, that landed Patrick drunk and alone in this depression apartment.

“How long has it been?” Pete asks carefully. It is hard not to cry, just from exposure to Patrick’s sadness. If he thinks about how, in his universe, he’s the one who misses a Patrick who doesn’t care—

They grip each other like they’re both drowning. Maybe they are.

“Four years,” says Patrick.

Fuck, tears spring to Pete’s eyes too. Holding hands is not enough. He gets out of his seat, moves around the table, pulls Patrick into a full embrace.

“You smell the same,” Patrick says, nuzzling his wet face on Pete’s chest. “Oh—you found your flannel.”

“My flannel?” Pete repeats.

“Yeah.” Patrick’s voice is small, so small. Patrick plants his hands on Pete’s chest, his thumbs inscribing soft circles, and asks, “Pete? Since this is obviously some kind of hallucination, do you think we… do you think we could…”

His teary gaze keeps getting stuck on Pete’s mouth. Pete’s whole body aches with the desire to kiss him, sad and slight and vulnerable and made of so much _need_.

“It’s real, Rickster,” Pete says. His voice won’t rise above a whisper. The weight of this apartment drags at him, anchors him low. “I’m here.” They are close now, so close. Pete swallows roughly. He wants this so much it terrifies him. Guess that’s the same in every universe.

Pete says, “We can.”

And they do.

Their mouths collide with years of desperate hunger. Pete clings to Patrick’s bony frame like it’s a life raft; Patrick pulls at Pete’s clothes with the urgency of a hypothermic man who needs another body to get warm. Things escalate quickly. Pete’s stripped to briefs and covered in Patrick’s bite marks before he really knows what’s happening. His hand is in Patrick’s jeans, full of Patrick’s cock, without anyone having the chance to think about it. Patrick bites his lip, kisses him so deeply they both see anoxic stars, writhes and grinds against Pete’s body. They are a live demonstration of desperation.

“You have to fuck me,” Patrick says into his ear, and Pete is so startled that for a moment he freezes. Patrick ruts against his hand, his cock hard and leaking. There are consent issues here. There are, um, ethics. Patrick sucks on Pete’s earlobe, presses two dry fingers into Pete’s asshole. This is enough to unfreeze him; he jolts, lets out a little yelp that does not express displeasure.

“You have to,” Patrick says again. “Please. Regretted for years that we didn’t get to. That I didn’t get to say.”

“If you called and told me that, I’m sure we could,” Pete tries to say. It comes out at least half gasp. Patrick’s other hand has started in on the tight, sensitive skin of Pete’s testicles. There is not a Pete in any universe or any circumstance who would say no to this, he’s absolutely fucking certain. There is not a single Pete Wentz in the entire multiverse who isn’t in love with Patrick Stump. Even in universes where they haven’t met—Pete’s sure of it. His love for Patrick is programmed into his DNA, is molded into the valves of his heart. It’s biological. It’s subatomic. This is what people mean, when they talk about soulmates. When they talk about _meant to be_.

But Patrick laughs ugly and ragged, his chapped lips scraping against Pete’s and raising full-body goosebumps.

“No, we couldn’t,” he pants, fucking Pete’s hand, tugging Pete’s dick against his hip. “You died in a parking lot in 2005, Pete. I didn’t get to say goodbye to you. I never told you I loved you.”

A sound tears out of Pete without his permission, a sort of howl of grief and realization. He wants to pull away from Patrick and he wants to keep going. The tears he’s been holding in, they start coming and don’t stop. Somewhere between a plea and a sob, he seizes Patrick roughly by the chin, kisses him with the full force of his loss and mourning.

Dead. Dead. This is the universe where he killed himself at a fucking Best Buy. This is the universe where 27 was the oldest he ever was. This is the universe where _he_ left _Patrick_. Where he left everything. Where he’s _dead_.

Fucked-up and desperate, both of them weep. Even as Pete pushes inside him, even as they fuck up against the kitchen wall, even as they kiss with reverence and moan with devotion, tears pour down their faces, salt stinging their mouths. They are haunted. They are ghosts.

They fuck brutal and broken-open and so imperfectly full of love. They fuck like no survivors. And really, that’s what they are—men who have not survived. Broken and emptied by the loss of each other, they try with their bodies to fill. To be filled. It works, almost. They are cracked vessels: anything put into them inevitably leaks out again.

Pete comes like he’s being gutted, like everything in his being is being hollowed out. Patrick bites the hand over his mouth so savagely it breaks the skin. Pete is grateful to the pain—it is grounding, a reminder he is still alive.

If this is what happens to Patrick when Pete dies, he will find a way to become immortal. He’ll never so much as glance sideways at death again.

Pete pulls out of Patrick, his dick falling slick against his own leg. He lowers himself to his knees, licks out the raw hot wetness of Patrick’s fucked asshole til Patrick’s begging. With shuddering hands, Pete turns Patrick around. He holds onto Patrick’s hips, ivory and too thin and dreadfully real, and swallows Patrick’s cock as far into his throat as he can take it. Like he’ll devour it, like Patrick is the only substance he can breathe and there’s no need for air—like a dead man. Lick, suck, swallow. He tries to express everything he doesn’t know how to say with his words: his hunger, his sorrow, his desire for Patrick’s healing.

Patrick comes at last; Pete swallows with gratitude, finds the taste not bitter at all. Patrick collapses in controlled slow motion, like a building demolition, sinks to join Pete on the unlovely floor.

Spent, of tears and grief and everything else, they hold one another in the way their own universes never allowed them to.

“I’m going to figure it out,” Pete tells this Patrick, this small wasted Patrick curled pale in his arms. It looks like safe but it isn’t, they aren’t. Only one of them knows he’s lying. “I’m going to find a way for us to be together.”

“Can you stay?” Patrick asks. The words are blunted of hope.

Pete presses a kiss to Patrick’s forehead, tries to send into his skin the emotional closure that will seal the wound he’s plainly dying from. “I’m the version of me that’s still alive,” he murmurs. “I have to go find the version of you that belongs with me, and make sure we don’t waste it.” Patrick makes a small, soft sound, and snuggles closer against Pete’s chest. Pete is both lying and not. He isn’t going to waste it. He’s not going to let Patrick waste it either. Not on him.

“For tonight, then?” Patrick asks.

Pete nods, knocking his jaw against Patrick’s sharp skeleton. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Yes, I can stay for tonight.”

*

Pete leaves the universe where he killed himself in the early morning. He doesn’t wake Patrick. He doesn’t know how either of them is supposed to say goodbye. He thinks of how Patrick fell asleep last night, tear tracks on his cheeks and whiskey on his breath and this look of _peace_ , contentment, smoothing out the harrows of his face. His cheek on Pete’s chest, his breath like the in-and-out of the tide where it chased itself over Pete’s bare skin.

Pete thinks about how, there or apart, he is a black hole sucking everything good out of Patrick. The kindest thing he can do, for this Patrick and for any Patrick, is offer the chance at a clean goodbye, and then take it. Leave before he makes it worse.

In the cold light of morning, he cannot see himself through the smog of his own thoughts, but that much he can see clearly. He is not good for Patrick. He is the thing Patrick breaks apart on. Perversely, Pete wants to see the universe where they never met at all—where Patrick is whole, hale, untouched by his spreading black rot. All the untarnished gold just streaming off him.

This is why he leaves while Patrick is still sleeping. This truth is a bitter, burning pearl. He will hold it on his tongue for the rest of his days. He dare not let himself be talked into spitting it out.

Pete leaves a note. He wants Patrick to heal, to live without him. He writes,

_know that somewhere I exist, loving you. this is the last time I will ever leave you. patrick, live your life. break death’s heart. let me go._

_xoxo peter pan_

He leaves his blood-stained t-shirt, steals a clean shirt and jacket from Patrick’s closet. It is with regret and without looking back that he kicks through Patrick’s full-length mirror. For the last time, Pete Wentz passes from that universe. No version of him will ever return.


	5. Timeline 13xb: Fall Out Boy Is So Two Years Ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amazing, brand-new fanartist [urieclectic](http://urieclectic.tumblr.com/) designed the gorgeous header art for this story, and the playlist that I've been refining into maximum thematic heartbreak while I write the story can be heard [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/4NRBzP0sudCEhZOUe28mcI).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have now entered the part of this story that is a contest of like, which chapter can hurt the most?
> 
> HOPE YOU ENJOY IT

Pete crawls out onto a granite countertop in another world. He wrenches his ankle when it slips into the bowl of the sink: fucking figures. His interdimensional travel skill acquisition has plateaued.

He knows exactly whose bathroom he’s in this time, even though he’s never seen it before. The particular combination of curl products, hair pomades, banana tattoo exfoliating lotion, pink rhinestone dog collar, and marbled glass one-hitter strewn across the vanity is pretty much identical to the detritus left by Joe Trohman on any given tour bus.

“Joe?” He starts calling out Joe’s name immediately. For one thing, he has no desire to be attacked by Joe’s little ankle-biting brindle bulldog. For another, in any universe, he knows Joe Trohman would not hesitate to mace him. Things are not always easy, with him and Joe. Things are not always easy with Pete and anyone.

Pete finds Joe and his friend Scott hanging out in Joe’s studio, listening to music with the intensity of men trying to write their own. Pete doesn’t even know how to explain his presence in Joe’s home—like, are they friends and bandmates? Are they old acquaintances who haven’t spoken in years? Are they mortal enemies?

Are they strangers?

But he recognizes the custom Fender on Joe’s lap, the Trohman model they designed for him; he recognizes the platinum From Under the Cork Tree plaque on the wall. That makes him brave enough to speak. “Uh, sorry if I’m interrupting,” he says. It seems a safe enough start.

Joe and Scott, all-around good dudes, invite him in with minimal awkwardness but not enough warmth to tell Pete anything definitive about his current relationship status with Joe. Pete drops himself into a beanbag, fussing with the zipper on the hoodie he stole from alternate Patrick. Finally he just asks: “We’re in a band, right, Joe?”

Maybe Pete being fucking weird is a multiversal constant, because Joe just kind of tips his head and says, “Yeah, man.”

“Like—currently? We’re not on hiatus or anything?”

Joe shakes his head, flooding Pete with relief. Then he says, “Not since ’09.”

“Uh… what happened in 2009?” He hardly dares ask, does not want to know.

Joe looks concerned now, like he’s going to start checking Pete for head injury any minute now. It wouldn’t be the worst call Joe’s ever made. “Patrick quit,” Joe says slowly, obviously. “You okay, dude?”

Pete is most certainly not. _Patrick quit_. It’s a fucking gut-punch. This is worse than the universe where Pete was dead. He has too many questions that need answered at once. The one that makes it out of his mouth first is, “How does Fall Out Boy exist without Patrick?”

Joe’s look of concern grows to match his scowl. “You and me are a pretty okay writing team, thanks,” he says peevishly. “We started this band together? If you recall? Anyway, it’s not Fall Out Boy without him, is it? We’ve been The Menace since Bren joined.”

“Bren? Brendon Urie?”

“We needed a singer, Brendon needed a band. Kismet,” says Joe. “We’re pretty okay, our first record sold well. Second one drops next month. I think it’s better. Scott, uh—do you maybe want to call an ambulance? I kind of think Pete is, like, having a stroke.”

That’s his cue to leave. The whole world has vertigo and Pete is the nonmoving point, the pivot on which reality spins. He gets to his feet with a steadiness he finds commendable. This is all just—too fucking much.

Is _every_ universe worse than the one where he started? All of a sudden Pete just wants to go home. He didn’t need, like, cosmic fucking confirmation of how hopeless he’s been feeling. He can’t stand the thought that his shitty, broken life is the best of all possible worlds.

“Does he sing, at least?” Pete asks Joe. “Does Patrick sing?”

Joe’s standing too, now, moving towards Pete like any sudden movements might spook him.

“He’s a producer now,” Joe says soothingly. “He has his own label. Let’s sit down a minute, okay, Pete? Let’s just take a minute and chill.”

Pete darts to the left; Joe moves to block him. He’s let Joe get between him and the door like a fucking amateur. “Can’t do it, Joe,” he says, breaking to the right. Joe mirrors him. “I gotta talk to Patrick. Where will he be?”

“In his office, probably. Calm down, Pete. Sit a minute and tell me what’s going on with you, and we can go down to New Nostalgia together, okay?”

New Nostalgia Records. Of course. It’s perfect, in a way. It makes him feel like he already understands this world’s Patrick. Pete’s shaking his head at Joe. “I gotta go alone, man. You know how these things are. Affairs of the heart and whatnot.” He fakes to the right and then bolts left, making it past Joe and out of the studio door before Joe and Scott can execute a pincer maneuver and trap him. “I’ll call you!” Pete yells reassuringly over his shoulder while he sprints madly for Joe’s front door. “Everything’s totally fine, I promise!”

And he’s gone.

*

Pete finds New Nostalgia easily enough. It’s a small suite of offices in the Loop. The waiting room window looks out on Daley Plaza and the Picasso sculpture there. He’s not surprised by the apparent trappings of success: Patrick’s a genius, he’s always said so. (Even if he hates the thought that he’s in a universe where Patrick doesn’t sing.)

He’s wandering through the waiting room, studying the records and awards on the walls, trying to imagine the music he hasn’t heard in infinite other universes and the ramifications for space-time if he buys a bunch of albums to smuggle across reality’s borders. Will he be plagiarizing his own lyrics, if he uses them in a different dimension? Will the way he thinks about music be, like, changed forever if he listens to something he was never supposed to hear? Pete harasses the receptionist until the guy agrees to play The Menace. Pete’s trying to decide if he likes them or not when one of the office doors bursts open and a small, bright-blond Patrick in a sports coat and open-collared dress shirt storms out.

“What the fuck are _you_ doing here?” demands Patrick.

Pete’s guts shrivel. He battles the urge to slip behind a potted fern and pretend he doesn’t exist. “Any chance you’re talking to him?” Pete asks in a small voice, pointing at the receptionist.

“Max, kindly turn that shit off,” Patrick instructs the receptionist. Then he turns back to Pete, his face twisted with dislike. “See, that’s what it looks like when I talk to him. This is what it looks like when I talk to you.” Patrick extends his middle finger grandly and waves it around his face, highlighting his scathing tone. “ _What the fuck_ are you doing here?”

It is possible that showing up unannounced and blindly asking to see Patrick, without even a cursory Google search into the status of their relationship, was a mistake. But seriously. How is _every_ universe worse than the one he came from?

Pete is already pretty clearly fucked here, so he just tells the truth. “I want to understand what went wrong in our relationship.”

Patrick’s mouth actually drops open. Slowly, he turns to Max and says, “I need you to cancel my lunch.”

With no indication to Pete, he turns and stalks back into his office. Pete cringes uncertainly in the waiting room for a minute, until Patrick yells, “Are you fucking coming?”

Always a glutton for punishment, Pete goes in.

*

Patrick sits in a wingback chair, his hands folded with force—clenched, maybe—on the desk in front of him. His eyes are hard and bright as burning coals. Figuring he’s not going to be invited, Pete takes a seat across from Patrick. He doesn’t feel like sitting, but he wants to defuse the energy a little.

There’s a part of Pete that feels perversely grateful. Here at last is a Patrick who will yell at him the way he knows he deserves.

“So, um,” Pete goes ahead and just launches into it, “if I were from another universe. And this version of you and this version of me had never interacted before this moment. How would you explain our relationship to me?”

Patrick looks at Pete for a long moment. Dislike is plain on his face, with just a touch of the exasperation Pete is accustomed to. This is a Patrick with no fondness for him left. It hurts like a bruise he can’t stop poking, a loose tooth he won’t stop tugging at. A scab he tears into a scar day by day. It hurts, but not in a way Pete wants to stop.

This is the Patrick he deserves.

Patrick sighs, gets up, pours himself a drink. He does not offer one to Pete. He knocks it back in one, refills it, and walks it over to the window instead of taking his seat.

He looks down at Daley Plaza so wistfully Pete’s almost worried he’s going to fling himself into it. With his back to Pete and the ice in his drink clinking from his slightly shaky hand, he bites out, “Is this just to fuck with me?”

God but Pete relishes it, the acid lurch of those words. The cold puncture of his belly, the sudden decompression of his lungs. It’s refreshing like getting punched in the face is refreshing. Pain makes things so—clear. This is not the dull throb of the day-old cut on his eyebrow, nor the slow sick twist of Patrick’s sorrow in the last universe. This pain is immediate, clean, logical, reliable. You could build on this pain. This pain is a cause and an effect.

Pete leans in.

“It is to understand,” Pete says.

Patrick heaves an exaggerated sigh, turns his back on the window, comes and sits on the edge of his desk. His eyes are knife-bright. His voice is sandpaper rough, serrated with anger.

“Okay then, asshole from another universe.” He sips his drink. “You left me. You said you loved me but you left me, again and again. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I left you.” Patrick says it with perfect, practiced flatness.

“Why did I leave you?” Pete doesn’t want to hear the answer, he really really doesn’t, and that is the reason he forces himself to ask. This is the excoriation ‘verse. He will not leave here with his skin attached.

Patrick snorts. “Which time? Because you were mad, or I was mad, or you fell in love with someone else, or you thought you knew better than me what I wanted or needed. Or you wanted a reason to self-destruct, you wanted to pair your latest suicide attempt with a crisp bouquet of fucking drama.” Patrick’s shrug is so overly casual, it gives away his pain.

Pete, meanwhile, is surprised the words aren’t literally drawing blood. Very little in his life has hurt as much as this. It is exquisite. It is awful. The worst parts—the worst parts are the words that sound like what Patrick has said to him before, when Pete voted himself off the band, when they started the hiatus that would become forever.

“When—was the last time?” Pete asks. His mouth is numb; words are just falling out. “When did you leave me, I mean.”

“2007,” says Patrick. “After Infinity. We broke up on tour, had to cancel the rest of our shows. It was ugly. You were so upset, you broke your basses. All of them, one after another, like being showered in splinters and split strings would compel me to take you back.”

Patrick does a dry little laugh, takes a long drink. “I’d been with you since I was 17 years old, you know? Leaving was the hardest thing. I’d never ended a real relationship before. I didn’t have a model for it—for how it was supposed to feel, how to put yourself together again afterwards. And I loved you so much. I thought you were the fucking sun, moon, and stars. In one bad afternoon I lost my career, my best friend, and the love of my fucking life. And were you sympathetic to how hard that was?”

The laugh is wetter, uglier this time. “Fuck no. You tried to scare me back into it. You smashed every bass, you tried to hurt yourself with the pieces in front of me. You said you’d kill yourself. But the thing is, Pete—you fucked me up so bad I finally didn’t care anymore. Terror, heartbreak, death, whatever. I was immune. You burned all the compassion out of me, til there was nothing left.”

Patrick finishes his drink. The calmer he gets, the more violently Pete begins to shudder. “You made it easy to leave you, in the end. Maybe I’ll even thank you for that one day.”

Pete is doing everything he can not to cry right now. Not to vomit. Here it is, after a lifetime of searching: proof. He really is a fucking monster.

Pain this bad, it sets you free.

Patrick walks back over to the sideboard. This time he pours for each of them. When he offers the glass, though, Pete can’t touch it. Pete can’t take anything from him. Pete has taken enough. Patrick sets it on the desk instead.

“So why’d you come here, Spaceman? You doing some kind of 12 Step Christmas Carol thing? Because I don’t want your amends.” Patrick’s voice is looser, warmer without kindness, as the liquor goes to work on his tongue. Pete wants that warmth so badly. He denies himself, deserving the cold.

“I don’t know,” says Pete. The words are bile on his tongue.

But Patrick doesn’t need him to speak. That is so, so obvious. “Everything I have now, it’s because I got out from under your shadow,” he says in this measured, precise voice. He looks Pete straight in the eye and says, “I felt like shit every day when I was with you. You weren’t good for me. I don’t think you can be good for anyone. I am so much better off without you.”

Pete is on his feet without deciding to stand. He can’t.  He can’t do this. There’s nothing he can learn from this Patrick that he doesn’t already know about himself. He is a fucking blight on Patrick’s life and he sees no need to drag it out.

“Thank you for telling me,” he manages in a whisper. Unspilled tears blur his pitiful view of the room. This is his worst fear, realized. “I’m glad you’re—you’re—” But he can’t finish the sentence.

Patrick does his bitter, jaded laugh again. Pete never thought a sound out of Patrick’s mouth could make him feel this way. “Is this not what things were like in your little alternate universe, then? Were you hoping for sunshine and rainbows and a quick fuck in my office?” Pete flinches visibly. Patrick doesn’t care. Why would he? “There’s a reason we haven’t done this in four years.”

“I hope I don’t come back.” It’s the most Pete can offer.

“I’ll drink to that,” says Patrick. His voice is brittle merriment. He toasts with no one. He’s still drinking when Pete leaves.

*

Alone in the 7th floor bathroom, Pete goes ahead and falls apart. He cries with a fury: a year’s worth of miserable unshed fluid ripping out of him, no agony spared. He punches the counters, the stall doors, the metal paper towel dispenser, because if he punches the mirror it will break and send him away from this suffering. If he punches everything else, maybe it will only be him that breaks.

Pete wants to break.

Pete doesn’t want to poison another universe, hurt another Patrick. He doesn’t want to _exist_. He wants to go find the reality where all life was wiped out by a meteor strike and live out the rest of his days safely alone. He wants—he wants—

Pete sinks to his knees, hugs his bent head and body in his miserable arms, and just fucking sobs.

*

Some amount of time later, Pete’s cell phone starts to ring. The intricacies of this are too big to ponder: does he have an interdimensional phone plan? Does the Pete Wentz of this universe have a different number, a different carrier, or are both their phones ringing at once? Which of them is this call even for?

He sees the call is from Andy, which doesn’t adequately answer his question, except that the Andy from home has no reason to speak to him, even if he had the desire. Because there’s no point to anything anyway, Pete answers the phone. “Yeah?”

Andy’s voice is staticky, the conversation crackling, cutting in and out. “Pete? Patrick’s heading—in case—the album—approve of this avoidance thing—let you know.”

Pete doesn’t catch nearly enough words to understand that sentence. Or even know how many sentences it is. “What? Uh—which Andy are you?” he asks. The Andy of this world wouldn’t call him about Patrick, right? But neither would the Andy of his own.

“—the studio. —can write,” Andy static-blasts unhelpfully.

Pete’s only half-listening anyway, because the mirror’s just caught his eye. It’s spiderwebbed with fine black cracks. Was it like that when he came in? He hasn’t touched it.

As he watches, the cracks spread. They get wider.

Studio, Andy said. Writing. Patrick. That’s not this timelines and it’s not his own either. Pete pulls the phone back from his ear and gapes at it. Where is this call _coming_ from?

A splintering sound. The widening cracks swirl with no-color light. The mirror’s going to give, Pete realizes, whether he punches it or not.

Pete gets to his feet, backs away from the paranormal time bomb. “I’m gonna have to call you back,” he says to Andy.

Then the whole thing shatters, shards of glass exploding outwards. He tries to dive for cover but the void behind the mirror, it’s _pulling_ at him. The phone rips out of his hand, flies into the vortex.

Pete grabs the nearest stall door just as his feet leave the ground, drawn by the irresistible gravity of the wormhole. Oh. This universe—it’s not going to let him stay. He’s an irritant in the timestream. It’s trying to get him _out_.

The vortex is roaring now. Paper towels are swirling through the air around him, getting caught in the sucking force. The faucet wrenches free of the sink with a great groaning crack; a surreal waterfall begins streaming upwards, out of the sink and into the mirror. Pete’s hands are getting tired, his arms sore. One of his shoes tugs free of his foot, vanishes through the portal.

Well, fuck it, Pete figures. These are his favorite shoes. He lets go of the stall door. He gets sucked into the riptide of reality, smacking his head on the counter as he goes.

He’s flung wherever the multiverse chooses to send him.


	6. Timeline #810c: It’s Not the Band That Goes on Hiatus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ummmmmmmm... I hope you love the way I hurt you?

 

Pete lies on his belly.

In a soggy spray of paper towels and broken glass, on the floor of his childhood bedroom.

Weird day.

He stays facedown on the floor for a while, and when that starts to feel pathetic, he slithers over to his childhood bed and slides into the Ninja Turtle sheets. He lived in this room on and off until he was 30. Somehow it still feels as safe, as much like _home_ , as when he was a kid missing his front teeth and begging for his first bass. In this room it feels like there’s nothing harder or scarier than the minefield of monsters between his bed and the door, and he can just call his mom to deal with those.

He eyes the mirror on the back of his bedroom door suspiciously. Those cracks were always there, right?

Maybe his mistake, in those other universes, was going out and looking for Patrick, for his life. Maybe he can just stay here in this bed until it all caves in on him. He’s not even supposed to _be_ in this dimension. Surely no one will look for him here.

He’s barely finished the thought when there’s a rap on the door, unmistakably his mother’s signature knock. “Petey? That you?”

“Yeah, Ma,” he calls. Five minutes. Could he just have five minutes without having to learn about painful new ways he’s disappointed versions of people he loves?

The door opens. His mom sticks her head in, looks exactly the same. “What a mess,” she clucks. “Did you break a mirror in here? How many rooms in my house are you going to forget to clean up, hmm?”

He tunes out the good-natured mothering and fixates on the clues in what she says. Even when he wants to hide from it, he can’t stop himself from digging. Even when he wants to lay down and die.

“Do you want to sleep up here tonight? I know the bed is bigger in the basement, but…” The way she trails off hints at undisclosed pain.

“But?” he pushes. He’s a glutton for something.

His mom looks embarrassed. “Well, you don’t really need the big bed without him, do you? I wasn’t gonna say it. I’m so used to it being the two of you, staying here together.” Without warning, her face crumples with sudden grief. She hides her mouth with one hand, fans her tearing eyes with the other.

Pete’s stomach knots with terrible dread. Oh god, oh god. If it’s Patrick—if he’s—no, no, Pete can’t—

“The two of us,” Pete echoes. He doesn’t know how to ask but he has to know, right now—

“You and Patrick. I love him like a son, you know I do.”

Present tense. She’s using present tense. Pete’s whole nervous system is jangling with pent-up adrenaline, postponed horror.

“I’m your mother, I don’t want you to get divorced. Of course I don’t. I just want you boys to work it out and for everything to go back to how it was, when you were happy. Is that selfish?”

Pete’s relief lands like a thunderclap, rattling him down to the foundation. Alive, then. Patrick is—

“Wait. Divorced? Mom—are me and Patrick _married_?” The words burst out before he can stop himself. Pete whips his hand out of the sheets, stares at the pale, untanned specter of where he wore his last doomed wedding band. _Married_. To _Patrick._

“You know I don’t like sarcasm,” says Pete’s mom. She’s looking at him strangely, and rightly so, when they’re both rescued from any awkward debriefing by the chime of the doorbell. “Oh! That’ll be Andy,” she says. “He called the house phone looking for you, said your cell wasn’t working. I didn’t think you were home, but he said you would be.” She points at him sternly, a tiny smirk on her mouth. She likes to get her retribution for sarcasm. “Don’t you dare get separated from Andy next. I like that boy.”

On the way downstairs, she fusses at the scabbed-over eyebrow cut, the swelling puff of where his face so recently struck a sink bowl. “It’s only been 3 hours since I’ve seen you. How _do_ you get in so much trouble?”

Pete’s so eager to escape this line of questioning, and her attention to any other discrepancies between him and this universe’s Pete, he attaches himself to Andy’s arm and rushes him back down the front steps as soon as the door’s open.

“See you later!” he calls to his mom, and steers a flustered Andy right back to his car.

Pete straps himself in, stares straight ahead, waits for weird alterna-Andy—who has a dramatically different haircut but otherwise looks the same as regular Andy—to take him on the next batshit crazy leg of this crappy adventure. A lifetime of fantasy novels and scifi movies, man: you’d think it would prepare a guy for a dimension-hopping tour of his own wrecked chances and suffering, but you would be wrong.

But Andy doesn’t start the car. When Pete finally looks over at him, Andy is watching him with open concern. “Are you okay, dude?” he asks at last.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Pete says. He does not attempt to hide the bleakness in his voice.

Andy gestures to his own face. “You look like you got in a fight. You have at least three hickeys. You were weird on the phone. I’m pretty sure that’s broken glass in your hood. Oh, and your personal life is a fucking disaster.”

Pete tugs at the neck of his hoodie, trying to hide his throat without spilling fucking mirror shards down the back of his shirt. Shit, he forgot about the hickeys. The Patrick he had ethically questionable grief-sex with was zealous about leaving marks. As if he couldn’t believe Pete was real until he saw the bruises. Which, join the club. That makes at least two of them.

“When is my personal life not a disaster,” Pete mumbles, because the rest is way too complicated to get into.

The look on Andy’s face gets even worse. “What are you talking about?”

“Uh… underage girlfriends, dick pics, tumultuous tabloid relationships? Suicide attempt, prescription addiction, general notoriety? Pregnancy scandal, shotgun wedding, public divorce? Am I not a slow-motion car crash whipping boy in this universe?”

Andy’s just looking at him like he’s fucking insane. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Pete. Unless you’re blurbing a fucking Bret Easton Ellis book, in which case, you know I don’t read that crap.”

Pete returns the incredulous look. Has none of his insane life— _none_ of it—happened here? Is he even Pete Wentz if he isn’t backlit by the smoking remains of exploded bridges?

“How would _you_ describe my personal life, then?” he asks. His voice is smaller than he meant it.

“You were a bit of a mess back in the day, when we did Racetraitor, I guess. Your mom used to threaten to send you to boot camp all the time. But, like—since you got together with Patrick like five minutes after meeting him, it’s been pretty… low conflict?”

Now this, _this_ , is pure science fiction. Pete cannot even comprehend this fucking shit. He needs to see more. He, well—he needs to see Patrick.

“Until this current divorce situation, you mean,” he says.

Andy frowns. Finally, he starts the car. “I still think you guys separating for the sake of the band is stupid. You don’t fuck with true love. If it’s the band or the relationship for you right now, I say let’s put Fall Out Boy on hiatus. Let’s set fire to all our records and never play again. The two of you, you’ve got fucked up artistic priorities.”

Before Pete can reply, Andy adds, “I know, I know, nobody asked my opinion. You persist in not asking. I’m just here to take you to the studio and work on the tracks Patrick started this morning.”

“We can’t even be in the same room right now?” Pete asks sadly. “After almost a decade together?”

Andy reverses of out Pete’s mom’s driveway, shaking his head. “Like I said. Seems fucked up to me.”

The rest of the drive passes more or less in silence. Pete keeps a sharp eye on the little crack in the sideview mirror. He’s pretty sure it’s getting bigger.

*

Pete’s a little fucked up about the idea that even in a world where his life went right—so right that he ended up _married_ to _Patrick_ —he still fucked it up. A world as good and easy as this, and still he’s only able to hurt. The thought settles into his bones til he feels cancerous.

Isn’t that the theme of all these timelines? That Patrick ends up fucked up, poisoned? That it’s Pete’s fault? Maybe the hiatus was inevitable. Fuck. Maybe it was a mercy. Here he is, trying to find a way to fix his timeline, but maybe the hiatus, the terrible silence between him and Patrick—maybe that _is_ the fix.

It is a thought with the effect of a punch.

By the time he’s in the studio with Joe and Andy, Fall Out Boy tracks that have and will never exist in his universe unspooling eerie and disjointed as déjà vu into the ether, Pete’s more than just a little fucked up. He’s devastated. He feels like a blight, a rot that spreads and spreads, all-consuming. Around him, lives and worlds break open. He draws forth the cracks in things. Pete makes entropy flourish.

All Pete has ever wanted is to create. To make a place he can belong, and offer as a haven to others. He’s tired of hurting. He doesn’t want to do it anymore.

Joe, who has been writing with Patrick all morning—their separation has radically shifted the band’s creative process; Pete wonders how bad the studio-screaming must have gotten for them to try it like this—is explaining what they’ve done with the track that’s playing, what they’re thinking in terms of melody. He is totally unprepared when Pete starts to cry. Pete just—he just fucking loses it.

“Hey kids,” he manages lamely, mopping tears off his crumpled face with the sleeve of his flannel. “Sorry I haven’t been around much.”

Joe squeezes him into a one-armed hug, holds their chests pressed together, thumps his back. “Hey dad,” he plays along, understanding that some of this is easier if Pete can frame it as a joke. “It’s okay. We like seeing you on weekends.”

“It sounds—it sounds good,” Pete says of the track. “Sounds like you guys have never really needed me. I just slow things down.”

Joe releases him, exchanging a very obvious Look with Andy. “I thought he was having a good week,” Joe mutters.

“He was!” Andy says. “Dale said she’s been counting his meds, and—”

“Is this too much today?” Joe asks Pete directly. “Because we can, like, go paintballing or something instead.”

Pete shakes his head so hard his tears go airborne. These may be the last new FOB songs he ever hears. He doesn’t know how long this universe will let him stay. He’s not going to waste it. “I’m here, I’m ready, let’s do this.” He speaks with unconvincing conviction.

He hates knowing that even in this soft universe, his life without the suffering, he’s a basketcase with friends who tiptoe and a mom who counts pills. He always thought he made more sense, in terms of what he’d lived through. He sees now it was all—excuses. This is who he is, a corruption he holds at his core. It doesn’t matter what happens to him. He’s the black spot of rot. He’ll poison anything.

This line of thinking, it’s not helping him stop crying. “I just want to know what happened to us,” he hears himself say. His voice is pitiful, pitiful.

From behind him, sounding weary: “I’m tired of explaining it to you.”

Everyone jerks towards the door. Through the blur of tears—god, how has he not yet run out of tears, he must be so fucking dehydrated—Pete sees the only thing he ever sees. He sees Patrick.

“I forgot my laptop,” says Patrick, pointing to the silver MacBook amongst the tangle of instruments and electronics. “I wanted to work more at home.”

He doesn’t sound apologetic so much as—regretful. Like he wishes he could have avoided this situation where he must come face to face with Pete. After all, isn’t that the reason for the cloak and dagger studio split? To protect Patrick from the fucking _sight_ of him?

Pete doesn’t want to make it worse, really he doesn’t. But he just keeps uncovering new reserves of tears.

Patrick heaves a slightly plaintive sigh, looks from Joe to Andy and back again, determines that, as usual, the dumpster fire known as Pete Wentz is his problem. His mess.

“Guys? Do you want to go out for—fuck, bubble tea? Matcha? Something soothing and green that takes like—20 minutes?”

Joe and Andy are out the door so fast it’s almost insulting. Listen, Pete’s had—he’s had a rough fucking 24 hours. Ever since he read on the fucking internet about Patrick’s engagement and started free-falling through bitter, broken dimensions—

Fuck. The two-way mirror in the vocals booth. He’s pretty sure, a minute ago, it wasn’t cracked.

Once they’re alone, Patrick sits on the floor, bypassing the various chair and table edge options. Pete feels ridiculous, weeping over him. Patrick waits patiently for Pete to sit down, cross-legged in front of him. Their knees touch.

“What’s going on, Pete?” asks Patrick. He’s using a voice Pete has never heard before—the soft, special voice you use when you’re being gentle with your partner. A voice of long-term intimacy, long-term love. Even with fatigue and frustration layered on top, at its base, it is voice that wants to take care of Pete. A voice that wants to see him put back together. A voice that is invested in him for the long haul, and so is willing to put up with bullshit in the present.

Pete’s never been in the same universe as that voice before. It dries up his tears instantly.

Pete says honestly, “I’ve been pretty messed up about us.”

And even though he’s said he’s tired of it—even though Pete himself is fucking tired of it—Patrick’s face goes soft to match his voice. He reaches out, puts his hand on top of Pete’s. They touch. They just—touch.

After a while, more words come to Pete. He says them carefully. “When I close my eyes, I see all the ways this could have gone wrong. All the ways I could still hurt you, lose you, ruin you. I’m so terrified, Patrick. Like if I make one wrong move it will all come crashing down, broken and lost. Like I’ve been having a panic attack for two years straight and I can’t snap out of it, can’t wake up. So I—I have to understand, do you see? I have to unlock the secret of you and me so I can make a move again. So I can move towards you, without bringing down the whole house of cards.”

Patrick speaks like dropping a smooth stone into a cool lake. “I don’t think a marriage is supposed to feel like a house of cards.”

Pete’s gut twists around the words. Patrick’s right. That’s the defect that he carries around within himself: he can’t settle, can’t calm. He’s so busy trying to stop things falling apart, his doubt and worry become the fault lines along which everything shakes and shatters. He’s the fucking earthquake. He’s the glass hill, forever in the process of coming down. He is the collapse. His love is shrapnel.

Maybe the kindest thing he can do is help Patrick get out of the blast zone.

Patrick takes a deep breath. He stares at their linked hands and speaks. “I think that’s a big part of why we—why I asked you to move out for a while. That fragility that you look at us, at me, at our lives with. That’s really threatening, you know? When every time something goes wrong or your mood starts to spin out, you start looking at me like—like I’m a grenade you’re gonna throw yourself on, like you’ll obliterate yourself for my comfort. When you treat every single fight like it’s poised to tear our whole life apart. You’re so worried about me leaving you, it starts to push me away. Because, like—it sucks that you doubt me. It sucks that no matter what I say or do, I can’t make you feel secure enough not to throw our whole relationship onto the train tracks at every inconvenience. It sucks that you keep going off your meds. It sucks that I always have to take care of you, that my job is always—put Pete back together again. It sucks that my emotional needs always get buried under yours, because you have so many, and yours are so much more dramatic, dangerous. It just—this whole pattern that we’re trapped in. It sucks, Pete. And I’ve been trying to get us out of it for such a long time. And at this point I think you just—you just need to fix _yourself_ enough that we can fix _us_. Because I can’t do it by myself. And I’m so fucking burned out on trying.”

It all falls on Pete like a hammer of blows. The thing is, this isn’t even his universe, this isn’t even his life or his relationship, but it’s still _right_. It’s still true. His own Patrick could say the same exact things to him about their dynamic, and it would be accurate. Would be true. How many universes has this exact pattern kept them fractious and apart in?

And yet Pete can’t twist himself to change it. He can’t twist himself to let go of the web, the responsibility, the sick need to annihilate himself in service of Patrick.

“So what do we do?” Pete can barely say the words. He’s learning the lesson these universes want to teach him. He’s figuring out—he’s figured out—the answer.

He’s the anchor on Patrick’s shirt. Holding him down.

Wishing won’t change it.

“Wish I knew. Maybe you go back to therapy? Maybe we go together?” Patrick is squeezing his hand, trying to catch his gaze. Pete realizes with a nauseating lurch that this Patrick means it, this Patrick still wants to fix things.

Pete—Pete can’t allow that happen.

“I’ve been hurting you, haven’t I? Not giving you what you need. Being a big, self-involved mess. To the point that—you don’t even want to be _around_ me.”

“Pete—” Patrick tries to interject. But Pete does his Pete thing, just barrels in and tramples everything that isn’t him.

“The band—we must have decided the band was most important. That we could save Fall Out Boy if our marriage—went on hiatus?”

Patrick isn’t holding his hand anymore. His face has shut. He is guarded, watchful for what comes next. Evidently, in this universe, Pete has given him reason to expect painful, erratic behavior. “Yeah, I guess that is what we decided. But—the goal was never to split up, Pete. The whole point is I don’t want to lose you. You’re the love of my—”

Pete cannot tolerate, will not survive, the end of this sentence. So he says, “Maybe splitting up _should_ be the goal. Maybe you’re better off without me.” The words last heard in that other Patrick’s voice—they are bitter on Pete’s tongue. They taste like gasoline. They _burn_.

Patrick reacts like he’s been hit. His face fills with hurt, then anger. “What the fuck are you trying to say, Wentz?”

Patrick can always be relied upon to fight. Good—Pete hopes his anger will protect him. Sometimes the way a thing heals or grows is unhealthy, is harmful. Sometimes you have to break it open so it can set right. And Pete doesn’t want Patrick to hurt. He wants Patrick to hate him instead. God, he feels detestable. He wants only the best things for this kid, even when those things aren’t the easy ones.

But he can’t say the words. He can’t make himself torpedo this whole _marriage_. Not when it so closely resembles what he’s wanted for himself for so long. So he says nothing. He just stares at Patrick, helpless and trying to get the words out of his mouth. He’s crying, he thinks—he feels so stripped, so ragged—his mouth opens around the obstructive weight of words unsaid. He’s choking. He cannot breathe.

“I’m saying—I’m saying maybe we should get divorced.” Even with all his practice saying it to Ashlee, hearing it said back to him, his voice splinters on his tongue and comes out broken. He dares not look at Patrick’s face. A more miserable moment has never existed. In any universe.

That’s when the wrong side of the two-way mirror explodes outwards, razor-sharp shards filling the air like sudden snow, as obscuring and deadly-edged as Pete’s hanging words. Pete looks at Patrick’s face after all, sees the shock and pain on it, watches a sliver of mirror open a bright red line across his cheek. Then Pete’s swept into the air and sucked into the vortex.

He does not say goodbye.


	7. Timeline #2: The Kids Are Alright

Honestly Pete does not even want to open his eyes in this next universe. He lands on his hands and knees on cool tile and just crouches there, eyes squeezed shut. Like a child— _you can’t see me if I can’t see you_.

Maybe this is the dystopian timeline where Japan won the second World War, or the one where humanity lives on a speeding train where the underclass eats bugs to survive. Maybe this timeline has nothing to do with him and Patrick. Maybe it’s a hell dimension where the Star Wars prequels had even _more_ Jar Jar. Maybe Pete was never born at all in this one. Maybe California has cracked off at the San Andreas and fallen into the sea. He just—he needs a fucking break. Heartbreak after heartbreak, hurt after hurt, a thousand thousand possibilities for ways things go wrong—he can’t take much more. Let this be the universe where he figured out early that he just needs to stay the fuck away from Patrick. Please, please. Let there be just one.

His hopes and illusions are summarily shattered by a nauseatingly familiar voice.

“What the fuck? Are you—me?”

Pete opens his eyes and looks up at himself.

This Pete, he has the fucking audacity to look _happy_. His cheeks are round, not the sunken sallow benzo-blank face Pete’s been meeting in mirrors lately. He looks healthy, bright, well-fed. His hair is cut short and spiky, gelled off his forehead and out of his eyes. He looks comfortable in his own skin in a bleach-spotted Metallica t-shirt and track pants. His feet are bare. He’s so well-adjusted, it’s obnoxious.

This is his home, Pete thinks, looking around for the first time. He’s in an open corridor, an expansive modern kitchen opening up just past where the other Pete is standing. It’s utterly unfamiliar, feels somehow _right_. Pete can imagine choosing a place like this for himself, belonging there. In another life.

“A version of,” Pete says. Thriving-Pete blinks a few times, taking it in. Then he seems to just—accept it. He offers a hand and helps Pete up.

“Have you come to warn me about triggering some dark future, or…? You look pretty rough, dude.” The other Pete leads the way into the kitchen, opens the fridge and sticks his head in in. Pete is impressed with himself for taking this fuckery in stride. “Beer? Juice? Green tea?” he offers.

Pete is having a hard time not thinking of this guy as ‘Good Pete.’ By far he seems like the most emotionally stable version of Pete Wentz in the multiverse. But Pete doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust that there _is_ a Good Pete. His lesson from this whole fucked journey, it’s that all Petes are bad. It’s that he’s irredeemable.

Pete’s about to ask for anything caffeinated when his attention snags on the collage of photos magneted to the fridge. Pete and Patrick, both with that annoying hale glow to them, the flush of happiness in their cheeks, pushing Bronx in a toddler swing at a LA park he recognizes. Pete and Patrick grinning at the camera from a cake-and-confetti decked table, celebrating a birthday in some restaurant. The whole band in a goofy candid shot from the _I Don’t Care_ video set, Joe in his seedy trenchcoat and Andy with his tongue out and Pete biting Patrick’s shoulder while Patrick merrily gives him the finger. A selfie of Patrick kissing Pete’s cheek. The two of them in front of a statue at a modern art museum in Malaysia, the two of them splashing in the face fountain at Millennium Park. A sweet snap of Patrick and a baguette in front of the Eiffel tower. Pete holding newborn Bronx at the hospital, the camera angled lovingly on him. Patrick, face knotted up with laughter, astride Franklin, the sheep from _Infinity_. It piles up like crime scene evidence, evidence of a _life_. A life that looks not so different from the one Pete’s lived, save that he and Patrick are clearly together. Somehow, Pete’s arrival here has preceded the inevitable collapse.

“I _am_ here from a dark timeline to warn you,” he’s surprised to hear himself say. It’s the most words he’s said out loud since yelling at the Patrick he was married to that they should get divorced, since he had the chance to try and fix things and exploded them instead. A young man’s just a pulled pin looking for a grenade.

Other-Pete closes the fridge with a snap, looking startled. He takes a long sip of green tea. After a beat, he says, “Okay. Shoot.”

Pete paces around to the side of the fridge, scouring the photos. Champagne toasts, red carpets, various monuments—arms around each other, dopey smiles in various locations. He’s looking for wedding photos, he realizes, with a tight fist of horror clamped up in his guts. Him and Ashlee, him and Patrick in the last universe. Pete doesn’t ever want to trap someone in a marriage with him again.

There are a lot of pictures, some from places and events he recognizes, some he does not. Black ties and suit jackets are scattered throughout, but he spies nothing more ceremonious than an awards show. There’s no evidence of anything _binding_. Pete feels a small relief.

“How long have you been with him?” His voice comes out frantic, unhinged, hungry. Accusing. It’s not an inaccurate characterization.

“Since I wrote GINASFS, I guess. About three years, officially.” The other Pete has a soft, fuzzy warmth to his gaze as he sweeps his eyes over the photos. Pete doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust anything about this.

“Didn’t you marry Ash? When she got pregnant?”

This Pete shakes his head, a look of alarm on his face. “No. I couldn’t. I wanted it to work out so badly, you know? But I’d been in love with Patrick since—forever. You know how that goes. Soulmates. Truer than that—twins. So we decided that best way for us to be a family, to raise Bronx well, was with all three of us as parents, me and Ashlee as friends and me and Patrick as, you know. Partners.”

The look on Pete’s face _feels_ like open hatred. He can’t vouch for what it actually looks like, but it’s probably fucking different than this glittery, twitter-pated softness he’s reading on the other guy. It just—it’s not all that simple, it shouldn’t be that _simple_. If it was easy, why doesn’t Pete have it? All the hurt he’s feeling, all the damage he’s taken on this journey through hell, contracts all of a sudden into a tight, hard rage. As always, it’s directed at himself—but what luck. Right here before him stands some sunny jackass wearing his face, just waiting to be fucking screamed at.

So Pete fucking screams at him.

“How can you do this? How can you do this to him? Can’t you see you’re hurting him, you’re going to _ruin_ him? That’s all you do, over and over again in every universe. You’re _poison_. I’m here to warn you about _this_ , about _him_. You’re just going to fuck him up. No matter what you do, you’re going to break his heart open, steal his voice like a goddamn sea witch, strip all the gold away. You’re going to ruin his fucking life. It’s all we’re good for. I’ve seen it again and again. I’m here—I’m here to stop you.”

Other Pete, happy Pete, how-dare-he Pete, just calmly sips his drink and watches Pete rage. He knows better than most, maybe, how much Pete needs to rage.

“You finished?” Jackass Pete asks after the silence has settled.

“I’m not sure,” the Pete who could also be described as Jackass Pete bites out.

“Because, I don’t know where you’ve been, man—but all of that? It sounds like bullshit.” He says it casually, with the slightest frown. He drinks more tea.

How the fuck is this dude so fucking calm and self-satisfied all the time, that’s what Pete wants to know.

“The whole thing about, like, protecting Patrick from you? From us? That’s so stupid. He loves you, you love him, and you both deserve to be happy. The rest is—like I said. Bullshit.”

Pete’s too stunned by this perfect nonchalance to even react. All he’s thinking is, how did he ever get to the point where didn’t just want to hurt himself as much as possible? How did he ever grow into a person who could heal and allow himself—happiness? How the fuck did he get to a place where his every waking moment wasn’t just fuel for the inferno of blazing self-hatred he’s always relied on to keep himself warm?

All he’s thinking is, forget a minute about what Pete’s love does to Patrick. What does receiving Patrick’s love do to _Pete_?

Because this person is unrecognizable.

And he thinks about how in every universe but his own and the one without Fall Out Boy, in every one of those universes—he and Patrick had been together, or wanted to be. How in every other universe they’d at least _tried_ it, or not gotten the chance and regretted it forever.

And he thinks about what this Pete is saying. He thinks about how maybe _this_ is the universe where, against all odds, they are happy.

“You’re being an idiot,” the other Pete tells him seriously. “You’re doing the thing where you feel bad, so you try to make your life match that.”

That sparks a response. “You wouldn’t _believe_ my life,” he says. The snarl has gone out of his voice. It is a flat, limp thing. “The band broke up. Patrick’s engaged to someone else.”

“Is that all? God, you’re acting like you fucking _killed_ him.” Pete can’t believe this asshole. “Listen—if the band and Patrick are things you want, go get them. Make things happen instead of making yourself miserable.”

It sounds so sensible, Pete doesn’t trust it. “Things aren’t that easy,” he tries to say. “In every universe we hurt him.”

The Pete continues to look extravagantly unimpressed. “So— _don’t_ ,” he says. He has a look on his face like Pete Prime’s being the difficult one. “If you don’t want to hurt him, don’t hurt him. Love him the best you can. That’s what I’m trying to do. You didn’t invent this, you know? Suffering, uncertainty, people hurting each other? Life has no guarantees. Our job is to just—live it anyway.”

Pete opens his mouth, probably to protest some more, but finds he’s out of arguments. If you don’t want to hurt Patrick, don’t hurt him. Love him instead. Is it really that fucking simple?

If this Pete managed it—could he do it somehow too?

The other Pete has a look on his face that’s part frown, part smile. He looks frustrated and sad and like he’s about to start laughing. It sounds like a complicated expression, but Pete actually recognizes it as one he makes a lot. Quirked bow mouth, eyes bottomless with sorrow, forehead crinkled, cheeks taut with the clench of the jaw. His sadness is an old skin. He’s worn it for so long.

Pete’s never been on the receiving end of that look before. Strangely, it softens him.

The other Pete reaches out tentatively, cups a hand to Pete’s shoulder. It is the first kind touch Pete has ever offered himself. The hand—his hand—it’s warm, charged with compassion.

“Trust him, if you can’t trust yourself. Do him that honor. Ask him if he wants to be bubble-wrap safe from the bumps, bruises, breaks of life. And when he answers—this is important, we suck at this part—you’ve got to take him at his word. You just have to believe him.”

Pete cringes just imagining it, a situation where Patrick says _go ahead, I don’t care if it hurts me._ Pete feels filthy. Manipulative. Like protecting Patrick is even _more_ urgent when Patrick thinks he doesn’t want to be protected. This is, of course, the struggle. This is the suffering. Hiatus, the silence between them, Patrick’s engagement—would any of these problems even exist, if Pete had learned early on to take Patrick at his word? To let him take his own risks?

“Love is faith,” the other Pete says softly. “We are dreamers. We worship love. We hope against hope and toss practicality out the window.”

Pete is surprised to hear a genuine, unguarded laugh spool out of his mouth. “I wrote that,” he says. “In my universe. I wrote it in my journal years ago.”

The other Pete’s eyes shine. “Here, too. I _am_ you, Pete. We’re the same.”

The implications of that go unspoken. Because he’s right: of all the universes he’s seen, this is the one most like his own. This is the one where the only difference is that Pete and Patrick figured out a way, even with all the drama and pain and bullshit, to move closer together, not farther apart. To let go of fear, or at least not let it change them. To live happily ever after, at least for now.

And fuck, does Pete ever want it.

“We’re the same,” he echoes. He tries it on, imagines what it would feel like if he believed it. It feels—good. Like a weight slipping off his lungs. Like he can finally breathe. “Look, I’m sorry about this, but I’m gonna have to break your mirror.”

The other Pete takes in the damage on Pete’s body, the bruised and blood-crusted knuckles, the swollen face, the scabby eyebrow, the hickeys, the various scrapes and stains and tiny glass shreds in his clothes. “Allow me,” he says. He grabs an oven mitt off a hook by the stove, stuffs a hand in it, and slugs his fist into his own mirror. It’s already spider-webbed with fault lines, just from Pete standing here; it breaks easy, like relief.

The Petes stand awkwardly before the sucking no-color vortex.

“It might not work,” Pete blurts wildly, when he means to say _thank you_.

The other Pete shrugs elegantly. “Might. Might not. I don’t know your Patrick. But I know you, Pete. And I never made a relationship work in my life til I learned to stop protecting people and start trusting them. So—go get fucked up. That’s what being alive is for.”

There are a thousand other worries and fears crowded on Pete’s tongue. But the other Pete really does know him. Before Pete can even open his mouth, other Pete’s hands on his back, pushing him through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed it, cats and kittens! This is the nicest chapter I've written in a while.
> 
> Next week will bring the exciting conclusion, but it will be posted late--on Sunday I will be _at San Diego Comic Con, doing a panel on queerness and fanfic_. So come see me there if you're gonna be there, and I'll deliver the concluding chapter when I'm back from California on Monday!  <3 <3 <3
> 
> In the meantime, listen to the playlist that goes with this story and just cry. That's what I do.


	8. Timeline #1a: Pete Puts His Faith In Love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey lovelies! I just got home from Comic Con, and it was COMPLETELY amazing and I had an incredible time, and our panel on queer communities and fanworks was possibly the most uplifting and nourishing thing I have ever been part of, and I thank you all for your well-wishes leading up to the event! It’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. When the kindhearted volunteers from 1D fandom who recorded the panel post pictures and videos, I will share them on my tumblr in the tag sdcc.
> 
> Pete deserves happiness too, I think. And so do you. Please enjoy! I have really enjoyed going through this kaleidoscope of horror with you!

Pete knows he’s home before he’s even fully clear of the vortex. It’s something you can _feel_ , a puzzle piece clicking into the missing space of your heart. The turning of a key. The stars aligning like a spine. He passes from the swirling blinding dark into the light. He is greeted by the surreal sense that he belongs.

Maybe the universe is feeling playful, because it spits him out of the reflective, mirrored surface of the Cloud Gate, the bean of Millennium Park. He manages to land on his feet this time, this last time, sparing his already ragged palms from meeting the wet pavement, a mercy for which he is grateful. Gratitude is peaceful and nourishing, a polar opposite of what he’s been feeling for most of this journey, most of his life. He lingers on it. It’s interesting, this allowing himself to feel pleasant things instead of trying to suffer as much as possible in any given moment. It’s new. It’s warmer than he expected.

It is a cold night, and the park is mostly empty. Pete moves quickly, not wanting to be identified by anyone who may have witnessed his impossible materialization from thin air. He walks for a while, not as penance, but because it’s been too long since he’s been in Chicago, in his Chicago. He drinks in the skyline, feels the glow of all the lights suffuse his skin. It feels beautiful, to be alive here in this place.

While Pete walks, he pulls out his cell phone. Hopefully he’s back in the wireless network for this dimension. He’s done a lot of showing up at Patrick’s door in the last, fuck, two days, and he’s thinking maybe he should try a different approach here. Since this is his actual life, the universe where he hopes to stay. He’d like to salvage it.

That’s new, too. For the longest time the only thing Pete’s wanted to build is a pyre.

For the first time in months, Pete dials Patrick’s number. He doesn’t really expect Patrick to answer, but he’s not prepared for the sick, shaking lurch of disappointment when the call rings into voicemail. Patrick’s recorded voice sounds no different, really, than another other Patrick’s; but Pete feels it, warm and slick and _right_. This is _his_ Patrick, the one he fell in love with, the one he’s made for, the greatest friend he’ll ever have.

Pete has a plan for a nice casual, collected message, but it’s not what comes out. “Things are such a mess between us right now, and I can’t really believe I ever let it get so bad,” he tells Patrick’s voicemail. “I’ve been thinking, though, that I wouldn’t trade it—this—for anything. Because this is the only universe with _you_ in it, Patrick. With this you. And that’s worth any amount of mess to me. I want to apologize to you. And tell you how amazing Truant Wave is. And I should tell you—”

A soft double beep lets Pete know he’s got an incoming call. “Fuck,” he mumbles, looking at the screen of his phone. It’s Patrick. It’s Patrick, returning his call.

He takes a breath. He reminds himself this is what he wanted. Wants.

He answers the call. “Hey, Rickster,” he says. The nickname, unused for so long, has the flavor of sawdust on his tongue.

“Hey, Pete.” Patrick’s voice is as careful as Pete’s. The situation is so, so fragile. Pete’s relief at hearing his name in that voice, the _right_ voice, brings tears to his eyes.

Faith, he reminds himself. Love is faith.

“I was leaving you this rambling, embarrassing voicemail. Maybe don’t listen to it. Unless you want to. Um. I’m unexpectedly in Chicago, and—I really miss you. Want to get dinner with me?” Pete hates the way his voice sounds. “Um, you can say no,” he adds in a rush. This is not demonstrating his faith in Patrick’s right to self-determination or whatever. Fuck.

Even though Pete sounds like a crazy person. Even though they haven’t spoken in all this time. Even though where they left things is _not good_ , and Pete found out Patrick was engaged because he saw someone else Tweet about it—even so, Patrick’s voice is warm. It implies affection. He does not say no. He says, “I’d love to.”

*

They meet at a Brazilian place, one of the last bastions of the Roscoe Park neighborhood they once lived in. Pete gets there first and spends 10 sweaty minutes convincing himself Patrick won’t show.

“This place used to be such a shithole,” Patrick says by way of greeting, once he does show and walks to join Pete at the booth he’s been filling with perspiration. “Now every time I come here, it’s trendier.”

Pete is unspeakably grateful to the light, opening banter. One of the many things he’s been agonizing about at this table is his opening line. His emotions and experiences of the last 48 hours are much too large for this one restaurant to contain, and he knows he looks as rough as he feels. There’s no casual way to break a multi-month silence that addresses all that stuff. Patrick has saved him.

Patrick has always saved him.

Pete, too awkward to live, had stood up when Pete entered the restaurant, maybe to be easily spotted and maybe because he thinks Patrick is the Queen of England. Instead of doing the safe thing and just sitting down, he offers an embrace to Patrick. His heart throbs giddy when Patrick takes it. The smell, the solidity, the warmth of him! Pete holds on tightly, briefly, and tells the truth. “Fuck, it’s good to see you.”

“Yeah it is,” Patrick agrees emphatically. He’s beaming at Pete like he can’t help himself. Pete’s eyes eat him up in the same way. God, he’s gotten thin. He looks even tinier this way, a small bright Patrick-bird that Pete wants to carry around on his shoulder. Pete hears himself laugh for no reason. He feels—he feels happy. This is the second time he’s been out to dinner with Patrick Stump in as many days. How did he ever let himself forget how good this feels? No wonder he’s been in shadow all this time. This kid has always been the sun.

“I’ve, um. I’ve kind of been avoiding you,” Patrick confesses after he sits down. “The way we left things feels like shit. I’m sorry.”

Pete is so completely taken aback by this, he chokes glamorously on nothing. “That’s my line,” he says. “I’ve been—maybe soul-searching is an appropriate word? I’ve really had to come face to face with myself recently. I… the choices I was making. They were pretty self-destructive. They didn’t leave room for anyone but me. And I never meant to treat you, or the rest of the band, like a one-player game and not a co-op. I haven’t treated you like I trusted you in a long time. And I want that to stop. I want to—”

The waiter arrives to take their order right in the middle of the avalanche of words coming out of Pete’s mouth. In another life, this would have felt like a universal sign he needed to apologize, withdraw, make himself small. Now it just feels like a sign that that was a lot to get into, maybe, before they’d even ordered drinks and appetizers. Pete catches Patrick’s eye and smiles while Patrick orders.

When the waiter leaves, Pete tries to leave the space for Patrick to respond. He is really, really trying. He really, really wants this to be different.

“I appreciate you saying that,” says Patrick. They’re both being so careful. “I wasn’t making very fair or considerate choices, either. And, um, there’s something I need to tell you in person. Elisa and I have decided to—we’re engaged.”

Pete swallows hard. He’s imagined this moment again and again. Just like with his opening line, he’s been unable to come up with a single word to safely say.

It’s just—it hasn’t escaped Pete’s notice that Patrick wasn’t with Elisa in any other universe. He knows they love each other. He thinks they’re good together. He _likes_ Elisa. Like, he supports it.

But Pete doesn’t think they’re soulmates.

“What would happen if I asked you not to be?”

The words just spring out of his mouth. For once he doesn’t overthink, doesn’t hesitate. Somewhere along the line, the truest thing started coming naturally. He’s not going to fight it. Even when the stunned look on Patrick’s face makes him feel like bursting into flames.

There is a long quiet while their waiter delivers their drinks, a longer one while he recedes again. Patrick studies his water glass intently.

Finally, Patrick speaks, directing his words to the water. “I’m gonna need you to repeat that. Slowly. If it’s something you’re really sure you want to be saying out loud.”

Pete draws in a deep, terrible breath. For a second he would rather be any other Pete, even the dead one. Then he breathes out.

“It would be easier this minute, this hour, maybe this whole fucking year if I didn’t say it.” Pete keeps his eyes on Patrick’s face, even though Patrick is not looking back at him. “But I’ve been making that call for years, and it doesn’t lead anywhere I want to go. Easier—easier isn’t what I need.”

“What do you need, Pete?” Patrick’s voice is little more than a whisper as he raises his gaze to meet Pete’s at last.

“Maybe it’s too late or the timing’s wrong, but I—I need to say it to you at least once, before you grow old with someone else. I love you, Patrick. I’ve always loved you. And I want to be with you. In any and every way you’ll have me. That’s all any Pete in any universe wants, really.”

Patrick lets out a shaky little laugh. “Those are not words I ever thought I’d hear you say. I—I don’t have anything prepared for this.” He laughs again. His eyes, bright with disbelief, are unreadable. “Uh, I guess first I’d like to thank the Academy,” he jokes. Pete is grateful for the opportunity to laugh. Grateful, grateful. He never believed he’d feel this way again.

“I know it’s a lot,” Pete says. “You don’t have to say anything now. Just—this is the first moment of my life where it didn’t feel monstrously unfair to even _say_ it. To even tell you how I feel, let alone ask if you want to be with me. I’ve been living in a house of cards all this time, and it’s like I only just realized no one actually gets hurt if cards fall down.”

Patrick has a new kind of look on his face, one Pete doesn’t know. He reaches across the table, offering his hand, palm up. Not quite believing he’s allowed, Pete takes it. They sit there in the quiet bustle of the restaurant, holding hands.

“I fell in love with you when I was 17,” Patrick says after a while. “Do you know that? I grew up lovesick. Now, it’s like—longing for you is in my DNA. I don’t know what I’d be like, if I actually had you. I don’t know if you can build a relationship out of that. I don’t know if I can leave someone I _am_ sure I can build with for that.”

The words sting like fucking razor blade hail. But Pete finds he can endure it. Pete finds that, no matter how it turns out, this really is the best of all possible universes. It’s the only one with _his_ Patrick in it. And he wouldn’t trade that for any happy ending.

With his shrug and with his words, he tries to embody that other Pete, that insufferably healthy Pete, the one who glowed with psychological well-being. Love lights from within, shines outward. “I get it. We don’t ever get any guarantees. Maybe we’d be a car crash together. But—if you let me—god, Trick. I’d do anything to find out.”

They unlink hands when the food comes. Patrick keeps stealing burning glances, blushing, and looking away.

“I need to think about—all of this,” Patrick decides over his dinner. They have found a comfortable, companionable patter of chatting that runs through all the threatening heavy stuff. The atmosphere, half lead and half potential, nonetheless sustains them. This is probably, Pete thinks, the most mature he has ever been about his emotional needs. He likes it so much better than feeling like he’s exploding all the time.

“Of course,” Pete says, means. “I’ll wait.”

And he thinks that’s the end of it, for now. He feels really good about it, no matter what happens: he’s been honest. He spoke his piece. He showed his faith. All things considered, it went really incredibly well, for the first time he’s seen Patrick all year. If Pete could live through this, he can do anything.

Then Patrick asks, “Where are you staying tonight? It’s just, um. I have the house to myself, and. I mean.”

And Pete thinks, maybe there’s more they’re going to try tonight than talking plainly about their feelings.

Pete wants good things for himself. He does.

Out loud Pete says, “This is _definitely_ the best of all possible universes.”

And it is.

 

 

_end_


End file.
